Party at Meacham

For people who are interested in other perspectives of the Dembski-party on Monday night, here are some other people’s take on the issue

Apart from ERV and Golfvixen at IIDB and me, some other accounts that deserve notice include:

• Today I was a pirate wench, by Jessie: while she didn’t actually get in, she represented the Pastafarians to the crowd outside. She has pictures of the event (or at least the Union outside the event).
• Taylor_31 at the EvCForum
• The First Coming of William Dembski, by Rhobology: Rhobology is pro-Dembski, but didn’t manage to get in either. He does appear to have seen Jessie though, preaching to word of FSM.

Apart from these (and probably others I haven’t stumbled across), there’s a lot of buzz about the fun times that were had.

• The Dembski Affair, by Rob Dowling: Rob is a grad student in Zoology at OU. Despite the fact that he studies animals instead of plants, he gets top billing because he’s a tropical ecologist.
• I like Dembski a little less now, by the Cephalopod King himself, PZ Myers.
• Carnival of the Dembski, from Ooblog.
• ERV is my hero, by Rev. BigDumbChimp
• Hilariousness all around, by thauron
• Dembski Admits Religious Motivation of ID, Deservedly Laughed At By Audience, by Mike at Hyphoid Logic
• Dembski piti esitelmän, which, while I can’t read it (or even have any idea what language it’s in), refers to both IIDB and ERV.

Update: This post by PZ, and the comment by Vic Hutchinson that it quotes, deserves note. Abbie noted how well ordinary students did not questioning Dembski and pressing him to answer their questions. They did really well. But, as Vic pointed out, this was facilitated by a lot of on-the-ground organisation done beforehand.

Monday night may not have changed the world, but it was a good indication of how irrelevant intelligent design has become. A decade ago ID was effective because it produced a new set of arguments that were far more sophisticated than the usual creationist fare. But new arguments become old, and people become familiar with their flaws. Between Wikipedia, talk.origins and the science bogs, there’s an awful lot of information out there – and it’s readily at people’s fingertips. People were online in Meacham (Golfvixen was liveblogging). It’s hard to pull the wool over people’s eyes when everyone has the information at their fingertips.

Dembski and the flagellum

In Darwin’s Black Box, Behe takes evolutionary biology to task for failing to explain the evolution of biochemical pathways within the cell. From this he developed the idea of “irreducible complexity” – that there are systems that are too complex to have arisen by (known) evolutionary processes. From there, he makes the jump to an “intelligent designer“…in other words, failure to come up with an evolutionary explanation is proof of God. Of the the central “icons” of intelligent design is the bacterial flagellum. Despite the fact that far more is known about the evolution of the flagellum than was known a decade ago (when Behe wrote his book), ID proponents still cling to it as a pillar of their anti-evolutionary arguments. In his talk at OU on Monday, one of Dembski‘s main criticisms of “Darwinian evolution” was the fact that it failed to provide a “complete, fully articulated path” of evolution for “molecular nano-machines”.

During the question section, several people took Dembski to task over the idea that ID isn’t science, since it’s impossible to falsify. Dembksi danced around the question a little, holding up the bacterial flagellum as a place where ID could be proven wrong. Eventually the questioner managed to pin him down with something along the lines of “would you be convinced that ID was wrong if the flagellum example was disproven?”, to which Dembski seems to have agreed (I believe it was there that Dembski said something to the effect that, if that were the case he’d be looking for another line of work).

It was against this backdrop that Dr. Philip Klebba offered to explain the evolution of the bacterial flagellum to Dembski in four, reducibly complex steps. At that point I was ready for Dembski to hold good to his earlier promise and give up on intelligent design, but no such luck. He now upped the ante, demanding that he be supplied with “every step” and “every mutation” along the way.

While I had heard that sort of ridiculous request from creationists before, it was the first time I heard it from a major ID proponent. While ID spends a lot of time claiming that the scientific community are unreasonable in their acceptance of evolutionary theory, Dembksi made it very clear at that point that he was setting the bar unreasonably high. Every mutation? We are in an Age of Discovery in the world of genomics and proteonomics. Dembski’s demand requires a level of knowledge which is well beyond current levels of understanding. Dembski talked a lot about the lack of progress since the publication of DBB, but the truth is that there will always be a limited pool of resources for things like this. Despite the fact that our knowledge of cellular subsystems have progressed by leaps and bounds over the last decade, there are still far too many interesting questions out there.

In real scientific endeavours, when you propose a hypothesis, there’s an onus on you to take a shot at either finding supporting evidence, or taking a shot at falsifying the idea. Since falsification of ID as a whole is impossible, and since finding evidence for the tinkering of a “designer” is probably impossible, why hasn’t the ID movement spent the last decade trying testing their flagellar hypothesis?

Most probably: because ID is a “ground clearing operation”.

Update: Wow. Febble at IIDB

Anyone else notice that the flagellum’s gone from the masthead of UD?

When did that happen?

Wow. Maybe Dr. Klebba’s point really did hit home.